Love Letters to Sudan

Description

A landmark collection of more than 200 photographs brought together by Abir Ibrahim over the course of ten years across all eighteen regions of her homeland.

Sudan is home to more pyramids than anywhere on the planet. For two thousand years the Kushite Empire raised them across the Nile valley. Its pharaohs ruled Egypt. Its warrior queens drove Rome back into the desert and buried the head of Augustus Caesar beneath their temple steps. This is that land, photographed in full for the first time in a generation.

Across more than 200 images, Abir Ibrahim documents a country of extraordinary depth and geographic range: the pyramids of Meroë rising from the Saharan plain, the slow ancient confluence of the Blue and White Nile at Khartoum, the misted volcanic highlands of Darfur, the coral shores of the Red Sea, the sacred granite peaks of the Beja in the east. A nation of more than 500 distinct ethnic groups and one of the most genetically diverse human populations on earth.

The book is also a record of people. Camel herders crossing the Bayuda at dawn. Sufi dervishes spinning at Omdurman on Friday afternoons. Fur farmers in the shadow of Jebel Marra. Beja warriors with swords sheathed at their hips, their hair shaped in the same towering style their ancestors have worn for millennia. Nuba wrestlers, Rashaida brides, Shilluk fishermen on the White Nile. The portraits return to the same villages and faces across a decade. Children photographed as teenagers. Elders revisited. Families followed through the country’s most turbulent years.

Abir Ibrahim began this work in 2014. Over ten years of travel across all 18 states of Sudan, often working alone and reaching communities by road, river, and on foot, she built a body of work unlike any other. Love Letters to Sudan stands as a landmark visual document of a country too often reduced in the global imagination, and rarely seen in its full complexity.

‘Sudan is one of the oldest civilizations on earth. It is also one of the least understood.’ — Abir Ibrahim

200+ FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHS: A decade-long visual record of every region of Sudan, from the Nubian north to the Equatorial south.

ANCIENT KINGDOMS: The pyramids of Meroë, the temples of Jebel Barkal, the royal necropolis at Nuri, and the great city of Kerma, one of the oldest urban civilizations in Africa.

EVERY REGION, EVERY STATE: Travel across all 18 states of Sudan, from the Red Sea coast to the Sahara, from the Blue Nile gorges to the highlands of Darfur.

500+ ETHNIC GROUPS: Intimate portraits of one of the most culturally and genetically diverse populations on earth, including Nubians, Beja, Fur, Nuba, Shilluk, Dinka, Rashaida, and many more.

A NATION IN ITS OWN VOICE: A counterpoint to a decade of headlines. Sudan rendered with the dignity, depth, and beauty its people have always known.